Storytelling Movements: Renegotiating the Inclusivity of Constitutive National Stories Within Serbia’s Student-Led Civic Protests

Death of 16 people under the collapsed canopy of a recently reconstructed train station in Novi Sad – Serbia’s second city –triggered the ongoing wave of nationwide protests against the entrenched corruption of Aleksandar Vučić’s authoritarian regime. Although the outcome of these protests remains uncertain, more than a year of continuous student-led mass mobilization is already transforming Serbian politics and society. A notable aspect of this transformation has been active participation of Muslim Bosniak students from the university town of Novi Pazar in this national movement. Given that othering of Muslims was central to both emergence of Serbia as a nation-state in the 19th century and to the wars and violence of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, the joint mobilization of Bosniak students and their predominantly ethnically Serbian counterparts from other university centers has been accompanied by the recurring need to (re)negotiate how the student movement frames intercommunal relations in Novi Pazar, Bosniak Muslims’ relation with the Serbian state, and contentious memories of the 1990s. By examining these intra-movement dynamics and their impact on the broader public discourse and attitudes in Novi Pazar and elsewhere in Serbia, my paper seeks to determine to what extent and under what circumstances constitutive national stories can be renegotiated from the bottom up. In doing so, I build on the recent research showing how narratives established at the nation’s founding moment shape the long-term prospects of democratization by authorizing particular varieties of nationalism. This emergent area of scholarship has already examined how democratization sometimes opens up the space for rival storytelling elites to invent and popularize novel interpretations of foundational national stories. My contribution, however, emphasizes how social movements, as powerful producers of culture, can create new layers of national stories through bottom-up practices, frames, and collective identities, thereby compelling the broader public to reckon with these more inclusive storytelling elements. To demonstrate this, I draw on established social movement theories, an original protest event dataset, novel empirical materials collected through interviews and participant observation, as well as public opinion polls and secondary sources from local and national press.